my tangle… »
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then good for “the media”…

Posted on Monday 28 May 2007


Departing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in a radio interview broadcast Monday blamed an overheated atmosphere at the bank and in the media for forcing him to resign.

Wolfowitz, who has announced he will step down June 30, denied suggestions that his decision to leave was influenced by an apparent lack of support from the bank’s employees.

"I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I’ll leave it at that," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. "People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend."
Actually, it’s expected from Wolfowitz. Like his pal, Douglas Feith, he is not only innocent, he’s a self-proclamed hero. But his comments remind us that neither Bush, nor Cheney, nor Gonzales, nor Rumsfeld, nor Libby, nor anyone else has genuinely taken responsibility for anything for the last six years. We occasionally hear "I take full responsibility" or "Mistakes were made," but we never hear it in any way that hasn’t been "hero-ized." Ever since Cheney’s recent speech at West Point, I’ve been a bit fixated on this point. After all that’s happened, and all we know, he’s still standing up there saying:
We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard. Scarcely 50 miles from this place, we saw thousands of our fellow citizens murdered, and 16 acres of a great city turned to ashes. Others were killed within view of the White House, at the headquarters of our military at the Pentagon. Many heroes emerged that day, both on board an aircraft over Pennsylvania and among the rescue teams, and they, too, died in the hundreds.
On the face of it, it’s a fairly expectable speech. It sounds like something from a Richard Widmark WWII movie. But it was graduation day at West Point five years ago when George W. Bush introduced what’s now called "the Bush Doctrine" – a set of principles introduced by Paul Wolfowitz sixteen years ago in George H.W. Bush’s Presidency. Pre-emptive, unilateral war to actively spead American Democracy throughout the world. It became the Project for the New American Century.

So now Cheney is standing up in front of our West Point Cadets, singing that same tired, crazy Wolfowitz authored song. Bush is making a Memorial Day speech with a twenty-one gun salute singing in harmony. Our soldiers are dying for nothing at the rate of 3+ per day. And I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth.

The media didn’t take down Wolfowitz soon enough [or Bush, or Cheney]. They’re trying to catch up, but there’s a long road ahead of them. But if he’s right that the media took him out, praise be to the media!

  1.  
    dc
    May 28, 2007 | 11:48 PM
     

    Good job M.,
    keep it up.

    I so like to hear the sound of the cheney-PNAC chord being pulled,
    ~undone.

  2.  
    Smoooochie
    May 29, 2007 | 1:03 PM
     

    This always goes through my head when I hear of these “great” men being so dedicated to their insane lust for power and greed. I doubt they know it.

    OZYMANDIAS
    I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
    And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
    Nothing beside remains: round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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